PART THREE
THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS
I. THE NICKNAME AS A WAY OF FORMING FAMILY NAMES
Marius was now a handsome young man of medium height, with thick, jet black hair, a high, intelligent forehead, passionate flaring nostrils, a candid and calm look, and with something hard to define that was at once arrogant, thoughtful, and innocent shining from every pore. His profile, whose every line was rounded without ceasing to be strong, had that Germanic softness that made its way into French physiognomy via Alsace and Lorraine and that complete absence of angles that made the Sicambri1 so recognizable among the Romans and that distinguishes the leonine race from the aquiline. He was at that stage in life when the minds of thinking men are made up of almost equal proportions of depth and naïveté. Given a serious situation, he had all it took to be stupid; one turn of the screw more, and he could be sublime. His manners were reserved, frigid, polite, not particularly open. As his mouth was alluring, his lips the most rosy red and his teeth the whitest in the world, his smile made up for what was severe in his whole physiognomy. At certain moments, the contrast between his chaste forehead and that sensual smile was quite strange. His eyes were small, his gaze grand.
In the period when he was most desperately destitute, he noticed that young girls turned around when he passed and, with a heavy heart, he fled or hid. He thought they were looking at him because of his old clothes and that they were laughing at him; the fact is that they looked at him because of his grace, which set them dreaming.
This mute misunderstanding between himself and the pretty passersby had made him fierce. He did not choose any one of them for the very good reason that he took off when faced with any of them. He lived like this indefinitely—stupidly, said Courfeyrac.
Courfeyrac also told him, “Don’t try and be honorable”—for they were on familiar terms; familiarity is a tendency early in a friendship when you are young. “My dear boy, a word of advice. Take your nose out of books for a while and look at the talent. There’s something to be said for the girls, O Marius! The way you run away blushing, you’ll end up a brute.”
At other times, Courfeyrac would say when he ran into him: “Hello, Monsieur l’abbé.”
Whenever Courfeyrac said something of the kind to him, Marius spent the week avoiding women more than ever, young or old, and he would avoid Courfeyrac into the bargain.
There were, though, two women, in all the immensity of creation, that Marius did not flee and that he was not on his guard with. If the truth be known, you would have amazed him by pointing out that these two were actually women. One was the old bearded woman who swept out his room and who made Courfeyrac say: “Since his servant wears her beard, Marius doesn’t wear his.” The other was a little girl whom he saw regularly and never looked at.
For more than a year, Marius had noticed in a deserted walk of the Luxembourg gardens, the walk that runs alongside the parapet of the plant nursery, a man and a very young girl, almost always seated side by side on the same bench at the most solitary end of the path, on the rue de l’Ouest side. Every time that fate, which gets mixed up in the promenades of people whose eyes are turned inward, took Marius into this path, which was practically every day, he would find this couple there. The man might have been sixty or so; he looked sad and serious; his whole person radiated that robust yet weary feel of the soldier retired from active service. If he had worn a decoration, Marius would have said: That’s a former officer. He looked like a good man, but unapproachable, and he never met anyone else’s gaze. He wore blue trousers, a blue redingote, and a broad-brimmed hat, all of which looked new, a black tie, and a Quaker shirt, meaning, dazzlingly white but made of coarse material. A young working girl passing close by one day said: “Now there’s a widower who’s nice and neat.” His hair was as white as snow.
When the young girl who accompanied him first came and sat with him on the bench that they seemed to have adopted, she was just a bit of a girl, about thirteen or fourteen years old, thin to the point of being almost ugly, gauche, mousy, though promising to have rather beautiful eyes one day. Only, they were always looking up with a sort of off-putting assurance. She was dressed the way convent boarders are, in clothes both infantile and too old for her, in a badly cut dress of coarse black merino wool. They looked like father and daughter.
For two or three days, Marius studied this aging man who was not yet old and this little girl who was not yet a person, then forgot about them completely. They, for their part, did not seem to have even seen him. They chatted between themselves in a quiet, oblivious sort of way. The girl babbled endlessly and cheerily. The old man didn’t say much, and at times would gaze at her with eyes filled with fatherly adoration.
Marius had got into the habit of walking down this path without thinking. He invariably found them there. This is how it went:
Marius preferred to come from the other end of the path to the one where their bench was. He would walk the whole length of the path, pass by them, then turn back and go as far as the end at which he had come in, then do it all again. He came and went this way five or six times on his walk and he did the walk five or six times a week without their reaching the point of exchanging greetings. Though they seemed, and perhaps because they seemed, to want to avoid people’s eyes, the old gentleman and the young girl had naturally attracted the attention of the five or six students who occasionally strolled past the nursery, the studious ones after their courses, the others after their game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who was in the latter category, had observed them for a while, but he found the girl ugly and so had swiftly and carefully given them wide berth. He had fled like some Parthian,2 firing a nickname at them as he did so. Struck solely by the girl’s frock and the old man’s hair, he had called the girl “Mademoiselle Lanoire”—Miss Black—and her father “Monsieur Leblanc”—Mr. White—so aptly that, as no one knew them from Adam in any case, in the absence of a name, the nickname stuck. The students would say: “Ah, Monsieur Leblanc’s on his bench!” and Marius, like the others, had found it convenient to call this unknown gentleman Monsieur Leblanc. We will do as they did and use Monsieur Leblanc to simplify this tale.
So Marius saw them practically every day, at the same time, for the first year. He found the man to his liking, but the girl rather dismal.
II. LUX FACTA EST
The second year, at the exact point in the story the reader has reached, it happened that this little Luxembourg habit was broken, without Marius himself really knowing why, and it was nearly six months before he set foot in his walk again. The day finally came when he went back. It was a blissful summer morning, Marius was full of joy as you are on a beautiful day. He felt as though his heart was bursting with all the birdsong he could hear and all the bits of blue sky he could see through the leaves of the trees.
He headed straight for “his” walk and when he got there he spotted the familiar pair, still on the same bench. Only, when he came closer, though it was definitely the same man, it seemed to him that it was not the same girl. The person he now saw was a tall and beautiful creature with the full array of womanly charms at that precise moment when these are still combined with all the utterly artless graces of the child; a fleeting and pure moment that these words alone can translate: fifteen years old. Wonderful chestnut hair streaked with gold, a forehead that looked made of marble, cheeks that looked made of rose petals, a pale incarnadine, a flushed whiteness, an exquisite mouth with a smile like a flash of light and a voice that was sheer music, a head that Raphael would have given Mary, placed on a neck that Jean Goujon2 would have given Venus. And, so that nothing was missing from this ravishing face, the nose was not beautiful, it was pretty; neither straight nor curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was a Parisian nose par excellence, that is, somewhat witty, fine, irregular, and pure, enough to drive painters to despair and to charm poets.
When Marius passed close by her, he could not see her eyes, which were constantly downcast. He could only see her long chestnut eyelashes dipped modestly in shadow.
This did not prevent the beautiful child from smiling while listening to the man with the white hair talking to her, and nothing was as ravishing as that fresh smile that went with her downcast eyes.
Initially Marius thought the man must have another daughter, that this girl was no doubt a sister of the first. But when the invariable habit of the walk had brought him close to the bench a second time, and he had studied her carefully, he recognized that it was the same one. In six months, the little girl had become a young girl; that’s all. Nothing could be more normal than such a phenomenon. There is an instant, the blink of an eye, when girls blossom suddenly into roses. Yesterday when you left them they were still children, today you find them downright disturbing.
This one had not only grown, she had been perfected. Just as three days in spring are enough for certain trees to cover themselves with flowers, six months had been enough for her to deck herself out with beauty. Her very own spring had come.
You sometimes see people, poor and mean people, who seem to wake up out of destitution and suddenly hurtle headlong into wild extravagance; they go on a spending spree and suddenly become stunning, lavish, resplendent. This comes from income pocketed; yesterday an interest payment came through. The young girl had received her half-yearly dividend.
And then again, she was no longer the school boarder with her felt hat, her merino wool frock, her school shoes, and her chapped hands; taste had come to her with beauty; she was now dressed well with a sort of simple, rich, unmannered elegance. She had on a dress of black damask, a short hooded cape of the same fabric, and a white crepe hat. Her white gloves showed off the fineness of her hand as she played with the Chinese ivory handle of her umbrella, and her silk lace-up boots emphasized the smallness of her foot. When you passed close by, her whole toilette gave off a fresh, green, penetrating perfume.
As for the man, he was exactly the same.
The second time Marius veered close to her, the young girl looked up. Her eyes were a deep celestial blue, but this veiled azure still held only the gaze of a child. She looked at Marius with indifference, as she would have looked at a toddler running around under the sycamores or at the marble vase that was casting a shadow over the bench; and Marius for his part continued his promenade thinking of something else.
He passed close by the bench where the young girl was another four or five times but without even turning his eyes her way.
On the following days, he returned as usual to the Luxembourg; as usual, he found “the father and daughter” there, but he no longer took any notice of them. He thought no more of the girl now that she was beautiful than he had thought of her when she was ugly. He always passed close by the bench where she sat simply because that was his habit.
III. THE EFFECT OF SPRING
One day the air was mild, the Luxembourg was flooded with sun and shade, the sky was as pure as if angels had rinsed it that morning, the sparrows were twittering deep in the chestnut trees, Marius had opened his whole soul to nature, he was not thinking anything, he lived and breathed, he passed close by the bench, the young girl glanced up at him and their eyes met.
What was there this time in the young girl’s gaze? Marius could not have said. It was nothing and everything. It was a strange lightning flash.
She dropped her gaze and he went on his way.
What he had just seen was not the unaffected and simple eye of a child, it was a mysterious gulf that had cracked open a fraction, then promptly shut again. There comes a day when every young girl peeks out like this. Woe to the man who happens to be there!
This first glance of a soul that does not yet know itself is like dawn in the sky. It is the awakening of something radiant and new. Nothing can convey the dangerous charm of this unexpected gleam that dimly shines its light on lovely expanses of shadow and that is made up of all the innocence of the present and all the passion of the future. It is a sort of vague tenderness, lying in wait, and sparked by the merest chance. It is a trap that innocence sets unknowingly as it goes about collecting hearts unwittingly and unwillingly. It is a virgin with the glance of a woman.
Only very rarely does that look, wherever it falls, fail to send its object into a profound spin. All pure feeling, all yearning, all ardent longing, is concentrated in that heavenly yet fatal ray of light, which, more than the most practiced ogling of the flirt, has the magic power to suddenly cause that dark flower we call love, full of perfume and poison, to bloom deep in the soul.
That evening, when he got back to his garret, Marius ran his eyes over his clothes and realized for the first time that he had the sordidness, the indecency, and the unbelievable stupidity to go walking in the Luxembourg in his everyday attire, that is, in a hat that was ripped near the band, great walloping carter’s clodhoppers, black pants that were shiny at the knees, and a black coat threadbare at the elbows.
IV. BEGINNING OF A GREAT SICKNESS
The next day at the usual time, Marius dug his new coat out of his wardrobe, along with his new pants and his new boots; he donned the complete panoply, pulled on gloves, an extravagant luxury, and took himself off to the Luxembourg.
On the way there he ran into Courfeyrac and pretended not to see him. Courfeyrac, when he got home, told his friends: “I’ve just seen Marius’s new hat and new coat, and Marius in them. No doubt he was off to sit for some exam. He looked a complete ninny.”
When he got to the Luxembourg, Marius circled the pond and gazed at the swans, then stood for a long time contemplating a statue the head of which was black with mold and which was missing a hip. Near the pond a potbellied bourgeois in his forties was holding the hand of a little boy of five and quietly lecturing him: “Beware of extremes, son. Maintain an equal distance from despotism and anarchy.” Marius heard the bourgeois out, then circled the pond one more time. Finally, he headed for “his” walk, slowly and apparently with great reluctance. You would have said that he was both forced to go and hindered from doing so. He was unconscious of all this and believed he was behaving as he did every other day.
When he stepped into the walk, he immediately caught sight of Monsieur Leblanc and the young girl on “their” bench at the other end. He buttoned his coat right up to the top, carefully smoothed out the wrinkles, examined the lustrous sheen of his pants somewhat complacently and marched up to the bench. There was something of the attack in this approach and certainly a desire to conquer. I say, then, that he marched up to the bench the way I’d say: Hannibal marched on Rome.
Otherwise all his movements were completely mechanical and he did not for a second deviate from his usual concerns, either with work or matters of the mind. He was thinking at that moment that the Manuel du Baccalauréat was an idiotic book and that it must have been written by rare cretins for it to analyze, as masterpieces of the human spirit, three of Racine’s tragedies but only one of Molière’s comedies. There was a high-pitched ringing in his ear. As he came up to the bench, he smoothed the wrinkles out of his coat again and planted his gaze firmly on the young girl. It seemed to him that she filled the entire end of the walk with a vague blue light.
As he came closer, his pace slowed more and more. At some distance from the bench, well before he had come to the end of the walk, he stopped altogether and, though he himself did not know how it happened, he spun on his heel and turned back. He had not even told himself that he wasn’t going to the end. The young girl would hardly have a chance to make him out from so far away—she would not see how handsome he looked in his new clothes. Yet he held himself perfectly erect, so that he would look good in case anyone behind him should happen to be watching.
He reached the opposite end, then came back, and this time he got a bit closer to the bench. He got as close as three trees away, in fact, but once there he felt for some reason that he could not possibly go on, and he hesitated. He thought he’d seen the young girl’s face poke forward toward him. In any case, he made a virile and violent effort, overcame his hesitation, and continued his advance. A few seconds later, he passed the bench, straight and firm, his face red to the ears, without daring to dart so much as a glance either to left or right, his hand shoved stiffly in his coat like a statesman. The moment he passed—under the cannon standing in the square—his heart fluttered with palpitations. She was wearing the damask dress and crepe hat of the day before. He heard a heavenly voice that had to be “her voice.” She was chatting away happily. She was indeed pretty. He could tell, even though he didn’t try to get a look at her. “Yet,” he thought to himself, “she couldn’t help but hold me in high esteem if she knew it was I who am the real author of the dissertation on Marcos Obregon de la Ronda, which Monsieur François de Neufchâteau has claimed as his own and stuck at the beginning of his edition of Gil Blas!”
He went past the bench, went right to the end of the walk a few steps farther on, then retraced his steps and went past the beautiful girl once more. This time he was very pale. Besides, he felt nothing but enormous discomfort. He walked away from the bench and from the young girl and, once his back was turned to her, he imagined her watching him and that made him stumble.
He did not try to approach the bench again but stopped about halfway down the walk and there he did something he never did, he sat down, casting sidelong glances and thinking, in the most hidden recesses of his mind, that after all it was pretty tough that persons whose white hat and black dress he admired could be so absolutely insensible to his lustrous trousers and his brand-new coat.
After a quarter of an hour, he got up, as though he were about to begin walking toward the bench again, surrounded as it was in glory. But, instead, he stood rooted to the spot. For the first time in fifteen months he told himself that the gentleman who sat there every day with his daughter must have noticed him and probably found his zeal rather strange.
For the first time, too, he felt some irreverence in giving this unknown man the nickname of Monsieur Leblanc, even if only in his secret thoughts.
He stood there for a few minutes with his head down, drawing in the sand with a stick. Then he promptly turned in the direction opposite to the bench and to Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter, and went home.
That day he forgot to have dinner. At eight o’clock in the evening he realized this and, since it was too late to go down to the rue Saint-Jacques, he said “Well!” and chewed on a bit of bread.
He went to bed only after he had carefully brushed his coat and folded it away.